Chapter 1 - THE ROOM STOPPED BREATHING
Elena stepped into view wearing the same burgundy dress she had been wearing downstairs.
For three full seconds, nobody moved.
Then David appeared behind her.
My father-in-law, Richard, slowly lowered his whiskey glass.
Martha’s fingers tightened around the arm of the sofa.
Someone whispered, “Oh my God.”
On the projection wall, David closed the bedroom door.
Elena turned toward him.
The camera had no audio for several seconds because of the security system’s privacy delay, but nobody needed sound to understand the way David reached for her hand.
Martha shot to her feet.
“Turn that off.”
I didn’t.
“Claire!”
Her voice cracked sharply through the room.
I looked at her.
“You told me they had business to discuss.”
The first sound from the bedroom feed finally came through the speakers.
Elena laughed.
“You really think she still suspects us?”
David answered immediately.
“Claire believes what I tell her to believe.”
A chair scraped across the hardwood floor.
David’s younger sister, Rebecca, covered her mouth.
I expected humiliation to burn through me.
Instead, I felt something almost like relief.
The man on that wall was finally saying aloud what I had spent months being told I had imagined.
David stepped closer to Elena.
“She’ll never leave.”
Elena smiled.
“Because she loves you?”
David laughed.
“No. Because she has nowhere else to go.”
That was when Richard stood.
I had never seen my father-in-law look at his son that way.
Not angry.
Disgusted.
Martha reached desperately for the projector remote.
I moved it beyond her hand.
“We’ve seen enough,” she hissed.
“No,” I said quietly. “You haven’t.”
Because I had not brought twenty-two people into this room merely to prove my husband was cheating.
That was the smallest secret I had discovered.
I reached into my handbag and took out the cream-colored envelope I had carried all evening.
David’s name was written across the front.
Richard saw it.
May you like
And the color drained from his face.
Because he recognized the law firm printed in the upper-left corner.
